Is fan magnetic field destroying my disks?

[mh]

Some of you may recall my new machine saga from the beginning of the month.

The Antec SLK3700 case that I'm using seemed great, with a nice 120mm fan blowing over the hard disk cage, which itself is nice because of screws mount through rubber vibration isolators.

But in the past week, as I've been testing various RAID combinations, 2 of my 4 barracuda IVs have gone bad. One was 4 months old, and the other about 18 months old. I've never had any of these drives act up before, and it's definitely not an overheating issue given the fan. Now I'm afraid it is a magnetic field effect from the fan motor.

The front of the disks is 1cm from the fan. Does anyone know whether the typical 120mm fan motor puts out a significant magnetic field? I'm running this Vantec fan at a much reduced RPM, off probably 4-6v instead of 12v.

I don't want to endanger the other two drives that are still functional if this is in fact an issue.

Thanks for any advice,
Mark

[mh]

Here are two photos that I took showing the case and drive position (with the two dead drives removed)

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/mchastings/l ... yahoo.com/

Thanks,
Mark

[Mirar]

I too have fans (80mm Papst) really close to the disks (5-10mm), and have had that for about a year. I haven't had any data detoriation, at least not what I noticed.

[Ralf Hutter]

I highly doubt that is your problem. I, as well as many other people are running Antec SX10x0 types of cases that have a fan-holder built into the HDD cage. The fan ends up being about 1/4" away from the drives. I have never (knock wood) had a drive failure in this configuration and have never heard of an inordinant amount of drive failures happen to all the other people who are running this exact same configuration.

About ten days ago I installed a 92mm Panaflo in front of the drive cage on my SLK3700 to keep my Barracuda IV a little cooler. I'm running it at 5V. (See the pics of my config in the Galleries thread) So far, so good but I'll post back to this thread if anything borks on my drive.